The Critical Request

The Critical Request

The Critical Request: An investigation into what blocks render
Serving a website seems pretty simple: send some HTML, the browser figures out what resources to load next. Then we wait patiently for the page to be ready.

However, browsers are complex and without a firm grasp on how resources are prioritized, fetched and rendered we’re needlessly penalising our customers with serious performance repercussions.

In this talk we’ll study how browsers determine which requests should be made, in what order, and what prevents the browser from rendering content quickly.

We’ll perform a live performance audit and demonstrate how to make meaningful improvements that go beyond current industry practices of “compress things and make less requests”. After this session people of all backgrounds should have a better understanding of where to start improving webperf immediately.